Maybe if they gave a shit about typography they would fix the bug in Word that prevents it from embedding more than one style of a given font:
> Perhaps most infuriating, Word will embed any number of styles per family, but it will only display one. Meaning, if you’re using regular, italic, bold, and bold italic in your document, all four styles will be embedded. But when your recipient opens the file, only the regular will display correctly; the italic, bold, and bold italic will be Word-synthesized approximations, not the embedded fonts.
> This last limitation means that Microsoft Word has reached the exalted state where it is not compatible with itself: it is writing data into its file format that it cannot read. Worst of all, this is not a bug—it’s the intended behavior [2].
The author of [1] has a set of excellently handcrafted fonts for legal documents in particular that are layout matches for commonly used fonts like Times or Arial but have distinctive looks instead.
Also offers pro-tips for typography for lawyers and for general office typography.
OK, valid complaint, but honestly this is the first time I hear about the font style "oblique".
Wikipedia says
> Oblique type is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used for the same purposes as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except slanted
So the use case for both italic and oblique font styles in the same document is very... opaque to me :)
The Victor Mono font is an example of a font that provides both. I use Italics for block comments, and Oblique for line comments. Do I need to? No. Does it look way better and make me happy? Yep.
Apple Pages. It also renders fonts much, much better - the difference in kerning quality is night and day. Unfortunately, Pages just doesn’t provide a lot of flexibility and power for formatting the document. It’s more like Google Docs - suitable for high school book reports.
Pages is awful for things like bibliographies and referencing. It's LaTeX is janky, underpowered, and for some ungodly reason avoids computer modern like the plague. In 99% of things you will be just one option short of what you actually want to display.
With that said it is easy to use. The documents almost always look like a document and not a bunch of text that has incidentally ended up on the same page. It doesn't take up too much vertical by using side panels well. It makes everything it does let you do easy.
I have used heaps of WYSIWYG editors over the last 30 years. I have used some LaTeX ones too.
Pages is the only one where I would keep the UI and just add more functionality (somehow without changing the UI).
Better font rendering has been a hallmark of mac apps since OS X was released. Even the version of TextEdit (mac Notepad/WordPad analogue, for those unfamiliar) that shipped with OS X 10.0 likely beats out Word when it comes to things like kerning.
What’s strange is that I use Microsoft Word on a Mac, and the font rendering is uniquely terrible in Word. At times it can seem that Microsoft goes out of its way to make its products do a bad job with core functionality.
> Perhaps most infuriating, Word will embed any number of styles per family, but it will only display one. Meaning, if you’re using regular, italic, bold, and bold italic in your document, all four styles will be embedded. But when your recipient opens the file, only the regular will display correctly; the italic, bold, and bold italic will be Word-synthesized approximations, not the embedded fonts.
> This last limitation means that Microsoft Word has reached the exalted state where it is not compatible with itself: it is writing data into its file format that it cannot read. Worst of all, this is not a bug—it’s the intended behavior [2].
[1] — https://practicaltypography.com/how-to-embed-fonts-in-a-word...
[2] — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/office_standards...